Grean and the others had made it to the lip of a huge pit in the ground. It must have been five miles in diameter, and at the bottom black debris smouldered. Shuria peered over the edge.

"Bloody hell," he breathed.

"So that's what caused us to go off course," Grean said.

"A nuke?" Ketsuban asked.

"A nuke," Shuria replied.

"But why?" asked Blackrose.

"I dunno," said Shuria sarcastically. "Nuclear testing, do you think?"

"No," Grean said. "From my schooldays, I know that a direct attack with a bomb or nuke will leave a much deeper pit, sometimes extending down to the beginning of the mantle. Direct being defined as on high. This looks almost... accidental."

"How can a nuke," began Shuria, "be accidental. Wow, you are a noob. Nobody fired nukes at things by accident. Well, except that one time in Grand Year 2008 when-"

"Enough," interrupted Blackrose. "What we need to figure out is if they'll be shooting more."

"Good point," agreed pretty much everybody, except for Shuria who had been interrupted.

A noise behind them made them reconsider talking and push it to the backs of their minds.

"Grean," whispered Ketsuban, "did you hear that? Sounded like an explosion."

"You think it was another nuke?" asked Grean.

"No, sounds like gas," answered Ketsuban. They looked around until they saw a sheet of orange cascading up into the air two hundred yards away.

"Why do you think that hap-" began Blackrose, but then arms grabbed them and pulled them away from each other. They felt cold, metallic, and sharp, and when Grean tried to twist out of their grasp they didn't budge. Grean began to panic inside. What just happened? he thought. Why were we grabbed? Who are these people... or things?

"Don't move," a warped and unfamiliar voice growled right beside his ear. A gun was pressed to the side of his head. "Or else you'll have to give me one good reason why I shouldn't shoot you dead."

There were more figures pressing guns to the heads of his colleagues. They were covered from head to foot in armor and looked barely Robloxian, mostly because of the abundance of armor.

"Who are you?" Shuria asked savagely.

"We're from F.E.A.R.," came the answer.

"I thought F.E.A.R. was dead," gasped Tahlia from where she was held by the neck in the crook of a captor's elbow.

"Not dead enough, girl," came the cold steely reply. "We managed to survive for two solid years... The leader's dead, but we aren't."

"That's the point," Grean said. "You don't have a leader."

"We have... others." The grip increased on Grean's shoulder.

"What division are you from?" Ketsuban asked quietly.

"We're clones," the one beside him said coldly. "Couldn't you guess from our insignia?" There was indeed an insignia: a red triangle, flipped and surrounded on the bottom by a band of scarlet.

"Replica Forces," Grean heard Blackrose whisper.

"Now," began the one beside Grean, "we're gonna count to three. At the end you will either tell us who you are or be shot."

"One."

"Two."

"Th-"

There was a crack and a smell of burnt cloth. The one holding Blackrose fell, dead as a stone. A figure, perched on a lump of stone, was firing at the Replica Forces. The other troops didn't hold on their promises of murder. They scattered and took positions, firing at the attacker. Grean took his opportunity and seized a troop. The troop struggled, but Grean found the weak point in its armor and pressed. The troop reset, parts falling to the ground wetly.

"Hey," the figure on the hill was yelling. Grean called back, "What are you doing?"

"Just helping along!," the figure shouted back. "Oh, by the way, this is Overseer 2 speaking here."

"Overseer 2?" Grean exclaimed. "Where have you been?"

"In Banland," replied Overseer 2, who was at that moment running through the fight towards a Replice Troop beside Grean. "Kind of hard to stay in, however, when an entire bloody wall just goes FOOM right in front of you!"

"Foom?"

"Y'know? Impact, all that?" Overseer 2 assassinated the Replica Troop with his bare hands to the sides of the head, squeezing the head, making it go more and more silver until it floated up from the troop's body and exploded.

"Oh," Grean said, "sort of like Onoma... whatever."

"Yeah, quite," Overseer 2 grunted as he was bowled over by a bulked-up Replica Troop. The two struggled for a while, blood droplets flying all over the ground. Then a boot came up into the large opponent's groin and it staggered back from Overseer 2. Shuria took this opportunity to leap up in the air suddenly. As the thing staggered around and turned in a wide circle, Shuria kicked it in the face, causing it to fly back and over the rim of a nearby pit. Incidentially, the lucky pit had been caused by an unlucky resident of Robloxity, as he was fighting in the uptown area with his fellow pseudo-noobs, being suddenly thrown thousands of feet up in the air, and deleting everything as he went down.

Blackrose finished with hers in a sort of gruesome way that involved both legs being split and the torso to go shooting backwards.

"Grean," she began, rushing up to him. Then she saw Overseer 2. "Um," she whispered to Grean. "Why is he here?"

"Bit of a coincidence, really," Grean said. "C'mon. One's bound to have radioed for backup or whatever. Anyways, we should be going now." He beckoned for everybody to follow him. Thery ran across the scorched grass and dirt, hearts thudding. Finally they stopped to rest behind a large overhanging cliff face that had been pushed up by the explosion.

"Okay," said Grean when everybody had sat down, weapons nearby just in case. "First of all, why are there F.E.A.R people still around? I thought they were dead? Did they know where we were?"

"How are we supposed to answer?" asked Ketsuban.

"Good point," aknowledged Grean.

"They just attacked me," said Overseer 2 from the shadows where he sat. "First one I encountered was at the edge of the pit. I was just tunneling around to the other side when there was this noise, and looking down I just happened to notice this Replica Troop comin' up the side. So naturally, I used the environment to beat it, then when I had found your helicopter I was attacked by a few more. I stole one of their guns, and then found you guys being held by Replicas. Then..." Overseer 2 mimed using a sniper rifle. "You know what happened."

"Yes, we do," said Ketsuban, rubbing a burn mark on his arm where a bullet had grazed it and narrowly missed Tahlia. "Pain happened." He winced. "Need to put a little ice on that burn, bro... got any?"

"I have a medipack," Overseer 2 said. He patched up the burn with some gauze, then turned back to the rest. "So, you think there'll be more?" he asked.

"Yes," said Shuria suddenly, in a bitter voice filled with hatred. "But there won't just be the F.E.A.R goons. There'll be others. Big groups who've just been shrunk down to small sizes rely on other groups to help them get larger again." He thought. "Vaktovians," he concluded. "Only group this side of the Solar System who are evil enough to help a disgusting little pest like what F.E.A.R's assumed to have become."

"Vaktovians'll kill us!," whispered Tahlia.

"Isn't that what they do with their days?" asked Ketsuban. "Besides shutting things down, I mean?"

"And that's them now, I'll bet," interrupted Overseer 2. He pointed to the sky, where a white light was getting closer and closer.

"How'd they find us this time?" asked Grean, who was on his feet.

"Wouldn't know even if I wanted to," answered Overseer 2, and took off.

OOO

It was a Badanov, and a huge one at that.

Ten thousand blox long, it dwarfed any air traffic in New Robloxia. The fins at the back sliced through clouds like nothing ever seen. The red lights dotted all over its body blazed into the eyes of the casual observer. The uncasual observer? Well, let's say they'd have to get used to having a head the size of a pea with little burnt bits on it.

Making a noise as if it was an elephant with autotune, the thing moved incredibly fast through the sky. Towards a cliff it soared. It readied its tractor beam.

OOO

"Hurry up!," Grean shouted as they pelted across a long flat stretch of land between two craters. The light behind them got much much closer and they could all hear a menacing hum which rocked the ground.

Suddenly, Grean felt himself being pulled upwards. He looked that direction to see a glowing blue light, a beam coming down and lifting him into the air. Anothert beam shot out and nabbed Tahlia and Blackrose in one. Now there was only Overseer 2, Ketsuban, and Shuria on the ground. Grean, studying the last one, saw something rather odd about his behavior. Shuria was reaching towards the rifle slung across Overseer 2's shoulder, and Ketsuban and Overseer 2 didn't notice that they were being robbed.

Shuria's arms flung out and wrapped around Overseer 2, who struggled to get him off and in the process slowed. The assailant grabbed the rifle, took aim at Ketsuban. Grean felt his stomach twist.

"NO!," he screamed, but nobody could hear him.

Shuria fired seven times into Ketsuban's back. Ketsuban jerked forwards, his back in a C-shape, and slowly lost balance until he skidded into the groundcover, throwing up dirt. Overseer 2 was pushed roughly into a beam and captured. Shuria finally allowed himself to be picked up in a beam and brought aboard the ship. As Grean entered the dark interior, he stared at Ketsuban's body as it rushed by. He was obviosly dead. No live Robloxian had ever had his limbs twisted in that particular way by a lively force.

"Hell no," he gasped. "No, no, no..."

A gun barrel prodded him in the back.

"Get up," said a familiarly altered voice. With it came a sound like the hiss of cold metallic snakes.